Not Unfair

In his review of William McGowan’s fine book, Coloring the News (Dec. 31), John Corry claims that the media coverage of California’s Proposition 227 was grossly unfair, and that the L.A. Times and other publications portrayed our 1998 measure to dismantle bilingual education as a nativist plot attacking Latino culture. Fortunately, this was not the case.

The Times and most of California’s other media outlets were quite fair in their coverage, and correctly portrayed the disastrous failure of bilingual programs and their unpopularity among Latinos.

Managing to obtain such coverage in the liberal media required considerable strategy, effort, and hard work on our part, but it did pay major dividends: We won by a landslide, despite being outspent some 25 to 1, and federal legal challenges to our initiative were rapidly overcome.

I would suggest that conservatives take this lesson to heart. Liberal media bias should be regarded more as an obstacle to be actively overcome than an insurmountable barrier to be passively denounced.